Quiet Quitting: Why Employees Are Demanding Fairness and Boundaries
forbes.com
forbes.com
- Sufficient money so you don't feel ripped off or left behind compared to others in your social class
- Agency over your day - you can take an afternoon off if you're feeling down, your kids are sick, etc
- Enough free time to relax and have an out of work life
- Lack of obstacle/roadblocks to actually doing good work
Most modern companies get all of this wrong. They pay the bare minimum and raises are small and slow, encouraging job hopping. You have to beg for time off like a child. No clearly defined off hours for most employees. The daily job is filled with bureaucracy and excessive micromanagement that slow you down at every turn.
Being disengaged is the logical response to these conditions.
Empirically, no. It's an exernality. Expecting private parties to manage externalities in economic transactions is nice, but demonstrably insufficient.
- Lack of obstacle/roadblocks to actually doing good work
...good having more than one meaning
It's so disappointing to see how many people don't mind working on weapons.
I've been at my current place for about ten years now because it checks all the boxes for me, too. Unfortunately, as all things must end eventually, we're slowly in the process of shutting down and this current job market is terrifying.
If you're getting antsy and thinking of dipping a toe in the market, I'd say wait a year or two.
- Not to be made to feel like shit constantly with non-stop criticism about every little thing you didn't 100% get perfectly right, meanwhile management has no accountability on all the stuff they fuck up, so long as they stay angry enough and put all the blame on their team.
Can you tell I am a little jaded?
- No pervasive surveillance, which is also a form of micromanagement
Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.
100%
I was a hard worker and a high performer for years and didn't see advancement due to politics. Now I have a bad rating, I'm likely to get PIP'd, but I'm simultaneously on the short list for a double promotion. How schizophrenic does your performance management have to be have someone either getting PIP'd or double promoted?
In a small company, can look at revenues and profits, and maybe breakdown by product line, and then create a bonus pool according to how well the company did and let managers decide how to divvy it up based on their evaluation of their reports.
At a very large corporation, how can you trace back credit for overall corporate performance to individuals? If individual contributors own stock in the company or RSUs, how do they know whether their actions are increasing the corporation's value?
I will push it a little further, because I suppose I personally am going through a period of disengagement the article is writing about. In the last major project I was a part of, I actually saw the opposite correlation: the more effort I gave, the more messy things were becoming ( sadly, it makes sense; in that project I was finding issues left and right; if I am going above and beyond, a lot will be discovered as broken ). Eventually, it gets to you.
<< Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank.
This is the other part. I got very little out of this project for pointing out all the issues and trying to somehow resolve them. If anything, I made myself a fair amount of 'enemies', who did not appreciate me holding up the process. Once you realize what is being rewarded ( and it is not doing things well ), you optimize for it.
And can you guess what is the metric that is being rewarded? Closing projects. Not completing them well. Not making it so that they work. No. Closing a lot of them and on time. So what if is done wrong? Fixing it is another project..
I used to think that approach is an exception, but I am starting to think this it is more of a rule now. That anything gets done is nothing short of a miracle.
Yeah, I agree with this, but really it comes down to money. With enough money, the other two won't matter so much. An MBA that can hold labor costs down one year might get a significant bonus, and get the corporate jet to take on vacation to Hawaii.
On the other hand if you're not management and you save the company $6million per year, well, good luck seeing a bonus from that. I'm sure it will go to the MBA's above you, including the private jet vacation to Hawaii.
Edit: Amending to mention that there are companies that do quite well at upholding standards. To those, thank you for trying.
'We're going to force workers into the office and hope they do some work out of boredom' is taken as a serious strategy because the average manager is mind-bogglingly incompetent. If you know how productive people are (i.e. your managers aren't morons), and you have incentives set-up (e.g. pay, promotions and hiring/firing is dictated by productivity), then there's no problem to solve. Workers who are more productive in the office will be forced into the office to meet standards, you don't need blanket rules.
My small team of 3-4 will occasionally go to the office when someone is in town, ask for a room/office get denied and assigned random open floorpan seats.
Usually sat next to the interns or the Helpdesk or some other noisy group we don't interact with at all.
Often they can't even find contiguous seating so we are sat hodgepodge amongst people we don't work with.
Would be better to go to a WeWork or something.
They really think we are cattle.
I am tired of this.
Are you going to give me one like that at work?
If not I'm less productive there and only showing up to polish your ego.
My corporate escorts rates are higher than my working rates accordingly.
It's not like I can't exfiltrate all their data with a python script and a web cam.
A corporate antivirus is a rather large step down.
Also if you ever come back to the family home, we will be calling the police, as you are no child of mine, not any more. Good luck!
Which is legally dubious in a lot of places.
Some of the return to office drives look a bit like constructive dismissal to me.
i.e. an attempt to encourage workers to leave without making them redundant by many conditions unpleasant.
This reminds me of that recent SNL skit where Nate Bargatze plays George Washington and when Keenan Thompson asks him about the slaves, he changes the topic hastily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
What employees want is money. All that extra stuff is nice, in addition to more money for their work.
Given the choice, plenty of people choose fewer hours for less money. Money is part of it. But people will gladly work for a better company in exchange for less money and no be getting screwed for it.
Provided you are making enough in the first place.
Many people are just living paycheque-to-paycheque, even with good budgeting and no frivolous expenditures, and a lower-paying job for less stress just isn’t possible. In that case, more money is the answer.
Plus, if wages had kept up with productivity, most people currently earning $50k/yr would really be making over $150k/yr for the exact same work and with all the exact same costs and expenses of life.
Where did all this extra money go? Look up. Waaaay up, to the very top.
Yup, current abysmally-low wages are the only reason why billionaires even exist.
Fair enough.
> most people currently earning $50k/yr would really be making over $150k/yr for the exact same work
I’m sceptical. You’d automate a lot of jobs before that.
> current abysmally-low wages are the only reason why billionaires even exist
Trivially falsifiable, or tautological enough to be unfalsifiable. Villains are convenient. But fictional villains don’t animate against you. We can fix income inequality a great deal without declaring war on one class or another.
That could happen. All automation is made by labor. Then the capitalists who by definition own the means of production can fire people since they own the automation that labor created. And why wouldn’t they? It’s in their own rational self-interest.
There’s the seed for class war right there.
Tell me you know nothing about economics, capitalism, or financial accounting without saying you know absolutely nothing about economics, capitalism, or financial accounting.
It all adds up.
People want and need: autonomy, purpose, mastery. Many (direct) managers can advocate for a raise but have no direct authority to grant it. All managers can provide employees with quality of life improvements that cost nothing without any approval at all.
In short, I believe you will find that past a certain, probably very high amount, no amount of money can compensate
* remote work
* no specific expectations of hours (beyond, normally, "a full day's work")
* capable leadership that doesn't throw people under a bus
* work that is non-exploitative and provides real value in the world
Edit: *THAT SAID* in most industries that aren't tech, higher pay probably means a lot more than that because they're ridiculously underpaid, in general.
Throughout my tenure (~8 years), I worked more than 40 hours/week. I loved, loved, loved the work. In the early days, I worked way more than 40 hrs. Then I got married and I worked fewer more hours. The board chair noticed and said something. I agreed with her and told her it was because I got married. She understood.
What she wouldn't acknowledge, though, is that my productivity at 30 hours a week surpassed every other staffer's. That was a problem and management was not gonna address general it. In some ways, I could not have cared less. When first married, my husband had a cancer scare and was in and out of the hospital over a couple of months. After a major surgery, I stayed with him in the hospital. He was so doped up that I got a ton of work done. When he got home, work sent food for a week. I worked from home and still got a ton done.
Colleagues wondered why I got this treatment. Most board members understood what that said about my colleagues; the ED was, again, not gonna do the hard work of managing us.
I really lucked out. But I often wonder what kind of good we could have done for kids and families in DC if we were all functioning at a high level. Such a missed opportunity.
Estimates from consulting companies are worth as much as estimates from LLMs or from rolling a dice: nothing.
If you want people in office, put your money where your mouth is. Prices are up and salaries are not.
I think it'd be dangerous to confuse quiet quitting with setting boundaries. If you want to set boundaries, you have to be proactive about it. Tell people that you won't do something, and why. Don't just silently drag your feet, it doesn't teach anyone the lesson you think it's teaching them, any more than a kid giving you the silent treatment teaches you anything.
Unfortunately this is very difficult to find these days in a lot of workplaces.
Sometimes the best way of setting boundaries is by communicating as little as possible.
If your total comp is $250k and your CEO's total comp is $25M you should put in 1% of your maximum effort at work.
That works once, maybe, but then you're at another firm copying the same model. Quitting again reveals a third firm with similar flaws.
Getting together with our peers, we do a survey of working conditions in the industry and discover that the same unfair treatment is nigh-ubiquitous!
That's when it becomes evident that "quitting" is an unsustainable strategy.
What these "quiet quitters" don't realise is they're poisoning their own well, if they use in their lives the services directly or indirectly of their employer.
Everyone else suffers too. Go ahead and downvote, you can't deny the truth.